This workshop will bring together researchers
who take the nanosyntactic approach to
language. The aims of the workshop are to
discuss both old and new data from a
nanosyntactic perspective, to highlight the
advantages of this approach and to discuss its
consequences.

The abstract should 1) be anonymous, 2) contain
between 400 and 500 words (exclusive of
references), and 3) state research questions,
approach, method, data and (expected) results.
Workshop slots are 30 minutes, with 20 minutes
of presentation and 10 minutes of discussion.
All abstracts undergo a reviewing process by
the SLE organizers and by us. Your abstract
will receive three scores: two from members of
the SLE 2014 scientific committee and one from
us, the workshop convenors. Notification of
acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2014.

The theory of Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, 2011a,
b; Caha 2009) is built on a radical
implementation of the cartographic tenet
according to which every
(morphosyntactic/semantic) feature is a head
(‘one feature, one head’ Cinque & Rizzi
2008: 50). More concretely, it assumes that all
individual features project their own
structural layers and combine into
binary-branching trees. As a consequence,
Nanosyntax takes the atoms of syntax to be
smaller than previously thought: in fact, the
atoms are submorphemic. This is contrary to the
mainstream view that morphemes are inserted
into terminal nodes.

An example to illustrate this comes from French
(Starke 2011a: 4-5, 2011b). The French verb
forms (il) entr-a ‘(he) has entered’ and (il)
entr-ait ‘(he) entered’ both express past
tense, but entr-a (the passé simple) expresses
perfective aspect, whereas entr-ait (the
imparfait) does not. In Nanosyntax, this is
interpreted as showing that features for both
tense (T) and aspect (Asp) must be packaged
into the portmanteau morpheme -a in entra.
Furthermore, the features T and Asp must be
merged in a particular order (dictated by the
functional sequence). Evidence for this order
comes for instance from the fact that languages
which realize aspect and tense agglutinatively,
e.g. Russian, always do so in a given order
(Schmidtke 2006, Dahl & Velupillai 2011,
Dryer 2011), with the Asp-morpheme closer to
the stem than the T-morpheme. Such examples
have led to the claim that T is higher than Asp
in the hierarchy (for more discussion see also
Tenny 1987, Cinque 1999, Harwood 2013). In
nanosyntactic terms the morpheme -a in French
entra thus spells out the phrasal constituent
[TP [AspP]]. More precisely, Nanosyntax assumes
that there exists in the lexicon a vocabulary
item which pairs the phonological form /a/ with
the syntactic structure [TP [AspP]]. When the
structure [TP [AspP]] is built in syntax, it
can be lexicalized by the morpheme -a since the
syntactic and lexically stored structures
match.

In Nanosyntax when two readings are lexicalized
by the same morpheme, this means that the
underlying structures associated with these
readings are in a subset/superset relation with
one another (Caha 2009, Pantcheva 2011, Starke
2009, 2011). More precisely, Nanosyntax allows
for a lexically stored structure to match a
syntactic structure if the latter is a subset
of the former. For instance, in the domain of
Case, the Hungarian morpheme -val syncretizes
comitative and instrumental readings. The
lexically stored structure of -val is shown in
(1). Importantly, the structure in (1) contains
the structure of the instrumental case, which
is shown in (2). Thus the instrumental
structure in (2) can be spelled out by the same
morpheme that lexicalizes the comitative
case.

The nanosyntactic perspective has also led to a
more precise understanding of phenomena such as
case-marking (Caha 2009), the interaction of
prepositions and verbal prefixes/particles in
Slavic and Germanic (Pantcheva 2012), the
syncretism patterns in English tense, aspect
and voice markers (Starke 2011ab), deverbal
nominalizations (Fábregas 2012), the internal
structure of wh-expressions (Vangsnes 2011,
Baunaz 2012, 2013) and wh-movement (Starke
2011b), the order and scope of derivational and
inflectional verbal affixes in Bantu (Muriungi
2008), clausal complementation (Franco 2012),
the relation between sentential and constituent
negation (De Clercq 2013), differential object
marking and nominal possession (Rocquet 2013),
and the reinforced demonstrative in the Old
Germanic languages (Lander, in prep.).

This workshop will bring together researchers
who take the nanosyntactic approach to
language. The aims of the workshop are to
discuss both old and new data from a
nanosyntactic perspective, to highlight the
advantages of this approach and to discuss its
consequences. Questions we would like to see
addressed include (but are not limited to) the
following:

1. The study of syncretisms has proven a useful
tool for uncovering the fine-grained
hierarchical structure of case morphemes (Caha
2009), path morphemes (Pantcheva 2011),
class-markers in Bantu languages (Taraldsen
2010) and negation (De Clercq 2013), among
others. Syncretisms also appear in other
domains, such as phi-features and
complementizers. What kind of syncretisms are
there? What do they reveal about the internal
structure of vocabulary items? What are the
implications for the functional sequences at
stake?

2. Most research on syncretisms is restricted
to syncretisms within one domain, as
illustrated by the Hungarian case syncretism
discussed above. However, syncretisms are not
limited to members of a single grammatical
category (Baerman et al. 2005: 103ff, Caha
& Pantcheva 2012). For instance, in
Russian, the masculine singular instrumental
endings on adjectives have the same form as
their plural dative counterparts (cf. nóv-ym
'newMASC.INSTR.SG/MASC.DAT.PL'). This
syncretism involves two dimensions, case and
number, and thus two functional sequences. How
do we model the ordering of these two
functional sequences in order to capture the
existence of this syncretism (Caha &
Pantcheva 2012, Taraldsen 2012, van
Craenenbroeck 2012)? In other words, what do
cross-categorial syncretisms tell us about the
underlying structure of morphemes? More
generally, the question arises how multiple
functional sequences are combined.

3. In nanosyntax the need to lexicalize
syntactic structures can trigger what is known
as spellout-driven movement. If no match
between the structures in syntax and the
lexicon can be found, then the syntactic
structure can be altered by movement to enable
spell out. Are spellout-driven movements
different from non-spellout-driven (e.g.
feature-driven) ones? If they are, the
following questions arise. Where do
spellout-driven movements stop and
non-spellout-driven movements start? Whereas in
Minimalism (Chomsky 2000, 2001) feature-driven
movement is taken to arise from an Agree
relation between the features of two heads, in
Nanosyntax all features project their own
layers. How, then, do we capture agreement or
non-spellout-driven movements in
Nanosyntax?

4. Given the idea that each feature corresponds
to one projection, the question arises whether
both lexical and functional vocabulary items
should be entirely decomposed into multiple,
individual features. That is, does the
nanosyntactic perspective imply that there is
no principled difference between lexical and
functional categories? If so, this raises the
issue of why lexical items are more malleable
and coercable than functional categories (Borer
2005ab, van Craenenbroeck 2012). How can these
differences be captured in Nanosyntax?